"It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It is a matter of converting our high technology from WEAPONRY to LIVINGRY."

- Buckminster Fuller (h/t Suzy Waldman)

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

"evidence for a hypothesis is represented as green, evidence against is represented as red, and the white area reflecting uncommitted belief that can be associated with uncertainty in evidence or unknowns....

As a litmus test question, I prefer the following:

Will the climate of the 21st century will [sic] be dominated by anthropogenic warming (green) or natural variability (solar, volcanoes, natural internal oscillations)?

which is the question with the greatest policy relevance, IMO. My scores on this one are

green 25%

white 50%,

red 25%.

Hmmm. Never mind the tiny sensitivity of climate implied. Just consider the clarity of thought involved here.

Do you think this creature is a duck?

Duck: 25% Not duck: 25% Unsure: 50%

I am 50% uncertain whether it is a duck, and I am equally 25% certain that it is a duck and that it isn't a duck.

But, but, but, you are misunderestimating the subtlety of that flaginism. She's saying that anthropognenic warming will account for 25% to 75% of the climate in the 21st century and natural variabilty will take of the rest. Or something like that.

It still leaves the question, what the poor Italians have done to Curry to deserve this kind of treatment.

No, BG, I wish she had said that, but she said that she is 25% sure that anthropogenic forcing will be more important and 25% sure that natural variability will be more important and 50% unsure.

If she had said what you say she said, it would have the advantage over what she actually said that it would be almost surely wrong, and one could argue with it. As it stands I fear that it is in the "not even wrong" category.

Well, CFAN would give Judy a reason to want to increase her public profile, and to the extent that the reactionary GTech milieu has any relationship to their client list it helps our understanding of what she's about. It's interesting to see that Peter isn't touching any of this, at least not publically.

Michael, do you really mean to say that in and of itself having a forecasting business puts them in the same camp as the parties you mention? Peter is pointedly not in that camp.

But the traditional techniques of long term forecasting are neither traditionally meteorological nor traditionally climatological (both being more rigorous).

They are heuristic and statistical, having something of the flavor of the charts and graphs day traders mess around with. More old school, in the tradition of Lamb and Bryson. Bryson was a delight and I expect Lamb was too, but they were no more mathematical than a smart tenth grader.

What's more, if climate change really takes off, the heuristics will break. So they have something at stake in not believing in severe climate change.

I don't understand what the flag is supposed to mean either. It's introduced this way, via the AR4 canonical statement:

" * Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.

This statement is often used as a litmus test for belief regarding global warming, i.e. you believe this statement (consensus) or you don’t (skeptic). Very likely denotes a probability of anthropogenic influence between 90 and 99% (lets pick 95%) and I interpret most to mean between 51 and 90% (lets pick 70%), with the remainder (30%) associated with natural variability. Hence, the Italian flag analysis could represent this in the following way:

Is the 67% supposed to come from 70% multiplied by 95%, and the 28% from 30% times 95%?

But the 5% uncertainty vs the other two are quantified on completely different dimensions, I don't see how you can justify conflating them like that!

For example, what does the 28% actually mean? Suppose 30% of the temperature trend can be ascribed to non-human causes, with 95% confidence. How does that become 28% (or 28.5%) of something else? I don't get it. Anybody else?

"Will the climate of the 21st century will [sic] be dominated by anthropogenic warming (green) or natural variability (solar, volcanoes, natural internal oscillations)?"

Well, presumably climate fluctuations over 2-5 (or 10?) years will be dominated by the occurrence or not of those natural events. The trend over 100 years will be almost certainly be dominated by whatever CO2e forcing humans impose. So what does "dominated" mean in this question?

That brings up another question. Obviously the climate of Pakistan was "dominated" on a numerical basis by natural variations. However that one month of extreme weather that appears to have been the result of climate forcing pretty much destroyed the last two decades of infrastructure improvements in Pakistan.

It's not the "dominant" pattern that we should worry about. It's the possibility of increases in outliers. How do we forecast/account for those in our calculations?

Michael, I'm somewhat familar with his work, and have paid close attention to the comments he's made at RC over the years, but otherwise I don't know him. I think you're correct about the generally statistical approach, but note that he has a number of papers featuring modeling work (albeit all with co-authors such that it's hard to know who did what). Re the heuristics, in sharp contrast to Judy he seems to have an expectation that they will change.

Also, I notice that he currently heads the AGU atmo sciences section, which I assume must mean he has fairly wide respect among more than just scientists in the tradition you describe.

I'll probably continue thinking positive thoughts about him so long as he continues to offer no public support for Judy's excesses.

http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=1549"A large majority of the public (76%) and nearly all scientists (97%) say that it is appropriate for scientists to become actively involved in political debates on controversial issues...."

Wait a minute -- CFAN was founded in 2006, according to their site, and people are just now discovering Curry's connection to it?

I hate to say it, but I have the strong suspicion that everyone on the reality-enhanced side of this discussion (call it the Truth Tribe, if you must) has been played like a fiddle as part of nothing more or less than a marketing push.